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The Unraveling

It’s hard to pinpoint just when, exactly, Barack Obama’s Syria policy fell apart. Was it in December, when Islamists humiliated U.S.-backed rebels by seizing what limited supplies America had given them?Was it back in September, when Obama telegraphed his reluctance to enforce his own “red line” after the Syrian regime used chemical weapons on its own people? Was it in the months beforehand, when the administration quietly and mysteriously failed to make good on its pledge to directly arm the rebels? Or did it collapse in August 2011, when Obama called on Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to go, only to do almost nothing to make it happen?

But collapse it has, and more than 130,000 deaths later, the White House is now pinning its hopes on a peace conference in Switzerland later this month that is being billed as the last, best hope for a negotiated solution to a conflict that has displaced a staggering 40 percent of Syria’s total population, some 23 million people, in what the United Nations says is fast becoming the worst and most expensive humanitarian catastrophe in modern history.

Thirty countries, the United Nations, the European Union and the Arab League are all sending representatives to the Jan. 22 conference, where they are expecting to broker a peace accord between Syria’s two warring sides. As it now stands, however, the meeting, known as Geneva II, is already a fiasco. None of Washington’s affiliated rebels has any significance on the ground in Syria any longer, and the rebels who do matter on the battlefield want absolutely nothing to do with the conference; they will not talk with Assad or his state sponsors Russia and Iran, the arms dealers and militia builders who are after all underwriting Assad’s war machine. In the months since Obama’s decision to cancel military retribution for the regime’s Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack in Damascus, we have witnessed the near-total collapse of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), and with it the last shred of U.S. influence on the trajectory of the conflict.

The president’s indecision played a major role in the FSA’s eclipse. First, Obama deferred the decision on whether to wage punitive airstrikes to Congress. Then he sent high-ranking officials to Capitol Hill to sell this unloved policy of military intervention in a halfhearted and nothing-to-see-here manner, downplaying the effect that the mooted “unbelievably small” airstrikes, as Secretary of State John Kerry termed them, would have on the regime’s war-making ability. Finally, with the votes not forthcoming, the president scrapped the idea altogether in favor of an 11th-hour plan offered by Russian President Vladimir Putin to decommission Assad’s chemical stockpiles. From there, what remained of the FSA quickly disintegrated.

But the seeds were sown months earlier. About a week after Kerry gave two rousing war speeches and compared Assad to Adolf Hitler, and just days after Obama announced that he’d be seeking congressional authorization for airstrikes, the Wall Street Journal reportedwhat every Syrian already knew: The light arms that the White House had licensed the CIA to deliver the FSA’s coordinating body, the Supreme Military Council (SMC), way back in June—when earlier evidence of the regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons had become internationally known—had yet to arrive, owing to the difficulty of securing delivery “pipelines.”

The Journal account suggested what now seems clear: The administration didn’t want the rebels to actually win (this was “somebody else’s civil war,” as Obama would later phrase it) or for any direct U.S. intervention to fundamentally alter the balance of power on the ground. It only wanted to run arms to persuade the FSA to buy into its negotiating strategy. “When we have more skin in the game,” one unnamed senior administration official told the Journal, “it just puts us in a position to have deeper relationships with the opposition but also work more effectively with other countries who are doing a lot in terms of support.” Instead, the White House took all its skin out of the game; and those other countries, chiefly Saudi Arabia, turned ferociously against the United States, with potentially dangerous consequences to come.

KEY PLAYERS

Gen. Salim Idris

A 55-year-old defector, Idris is now chief of staff of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the most Western-friendly grouping of Syrian rebels. Prior to the war, Idris had been dean of a military engineering academy in Aleppo, and other rebel leaders have scoffed at his battlefield acumen. The United States has equipped the FSA with non-lethal supplies, but has been leery of providing weapons directly, and the FSA has lost considerable support in recent months as Islamist groups have gained ground.

Zahran Alloush

A hard-line Salafist and former prisoner who heads the Islamic Front, an umbrella group of Islamist Syrian rebel brigades estimated to be able to muster as many as 60,000 fighters, Alloush is close to Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Front’s chief patron. He has positioned himself between al Qaeda and the FSA, but some analysts question just how distinct his views are from al Qaeda’s.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud

The head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, Bandar is a familiar figure in Washington, where he was ambassador from 1983-2005 and played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Afghan jihad. In recent months, the 64-year-old Bandar, who spearheads Saudi Arabia’s Syrian strategy, has grown increasingly critical of U.S. policies in Syria. U.S. officials have fired back, with Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly describing the freelancing Bandar as “the problem.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Little is known about the shadowy commander of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the more extreme of two al Qaeda offshoots fighting in the Syrian civil war. Baghdadi, an Iraqi, was the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq before it expanded to become ISIS. The U.S. State Department has branded the 42-year-old Baghdadi, also known as Ibrahim Ali Al-Badri Al-Samarrai, a “specially designated global terrorist.” According to some estimates, he commands more than 5,000 foreign fighters.

So while historians can debate the exact expiration date on Obama’s Syria policy for posterity, the last four months should be remembered for what they were: a series of crisis points, botched responses and missed opportunities. This is the story of what happened inside Syria after Obama changed his mind and made Assad and Putin his peace partners, while the world looked away.

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It did not take long for al Qaeda to smell an opportunity.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s successor to Osama bin Laden, was the first to sense most keenly Obama’s wobbliness on Syria and the deleterious impact that a deferred U.S. attack on Assad would have on FSA morale and credibility. In his address on the 12th anniversary of 9/11, Zawahiri denounced the FSA for the first time as “enemies of Islam” and agents of a U.S.-backed program for fomenting a Sunni “awakening,” or sahwa, which he defined as a hearts-and-minds strategy designed to isolate and defeat al Qaeda, just as tribal leaders and coalition forces had done half a decade ago in Iraq.

But in Syria, there are now two al Qaeda affiliates or offshoots. The strongest is the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), by far the more brutal and uncompromising of the two. The man in charge of ISIS is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi who claims to be a direct descendant from the Prophet Mohamed and is clearly running one of the most expansive and successful jihadist campaigns in the Middle East. Baghdadi sent operatives into Syria in the summer of 2011 who created Jabhat al-Nusra, which began carrying out suicide bombings throughout the country and was blacklisted by the United States in late 2012. However, Nusra split with ISIS last year owing to tensions between Baghdadi and Nusra’s own leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani. (Zawahiri sided with Jawlani and tried in vain to rein in Baghdadi, now relocated from Iraq to Syria.) In the last several months, ISIS has emerged as the more powerful faction, having absorbed a great deal of Nusra’s fighters. According to an intelligence briefing prepared by the SMC, the “most dangerous and most important” section of the organization “consists of approximately 5,500 foreign fighters.”

It was ISIS that went to war with the FSA. A day after Zawahiri’s communiqué, on Sept. 12, it launched a campaign known evocatively as “Expunging Filth” and aimed at the U.S.-backedal-Farouq and al-Nasr brigades in northern Syria. ISIS had already killed Kamal Hamami, an SMC commander, in July after a dispute at one of the group’s checkpoints in Latakia, but now it took to executing another SMC rebel on charges of trying to precipitate sahwa. But the starkest expression of this internecine warfare came about a week later, on Sept. 18, when ISIS violently raided the northern town of Azaz, which lies strategically south of a main border crossing between Syria and Turkey through which “non-lethal” Western aid had been delivered to SMC groups.

One of these groups, the Northern Storm Brigade, which hosted Sen. John McCain in Syrialast May, was expelled from Azaz by the jihadists. Panicked and outmatched, Northern Storm called on Liwa al-Tawhid, a nominally SMC-aligned Islamist “super-brigade” in Aleppo, to come to its rescue. Tawhid is, or was, a pragmatic Islamist militia known for being open to greater Western support, if only such had ever been forthcoming, and also one of the largest rebel formations in Syria, with an estimated 12,000 fighters. Tawhid heeded Northern Storm’s call for help and dispatched forces to Azaz to try to calm a chaotic situation. Meanwhile, an intense debate broke out among Tawhid’s commanders, as several rebels informed me at the time, about whether or not to use the Azaz takeover as an opportunity to declare all-out war on ISIS or to mediate the crisis through negotiations.

In the end, the border crossing was returned to the FSA,but Azaz wasn’t. And the damage was done. After this incident, and following further ISIS gains throughout northern and eastern Syria, more and more FSA-aligned fighters, sometimes even whole brigades, began defecting to the al Qaeda franchise. Areas where the FSA had once had strong presences, such as Binnish, Dana and al-Bab — a town I visited in late July 2012 under FSA escort, days after it had been liberated from regime control — now fell to ISIS.

By this time, too, many rebels were coming to the realization that by allowing foreign extremists into Syria in the absence of Western intervention, they had inadvertently laid the groundwork for a totalitarian counterpart to the regime, one that tolerates no dissent and has kidnapped journalists, activists and a popular Jesuit priest, and staged public beheadings of its enemies. When I interviewed FSA fighters, including Islamists, in southern Turkey in mid-September, their common refrain was that they now faced two mortal enemies. “Bashar al-Assad is beautiful compared to the Islamic State,” one rebel aligned with the SMC told me at the time.

Michael Weiss is a columnist at NOW Lebanon and Foreign Policy. He’s been reporting on the Syria conflict since June 2011.